Huge cuts to mental health services averted

Proposed cuts to mental health and drug treatment for the indigent were averted Sunday night. The cuts would have placed Florida 50th in the nation in spending for those services.

By Anne GeggisStaff writer

Proposed cuts to mental health and drug treatment for the indigent were averted Sunday night.

The cuts would have placed Florida 50th in the nation in spending for those services.

Negotiations between the state House and Senate committees settled on modest cuts to mental health and drug treatment in community health centers in talks on the $70 billion budget for next year's state budget. And it looks as though the Senate's proposed $83 million cut in community mental health and substance abuse — the largest year-to-year decrease ever — had melted into a $2 million cut, according to Bob Sharpe, the chief executive and president of Florida Council for Community Mental Health in Tallahassee.

Sharpe called it a "reasonable" budget.

"We got through another session," said the lobbyist for Florida's 70 community mental health centers.

Florida is 49th among the states — only Texas spends less — when funding for mental health agencies like Meridian Behavioral Healthcare, based in Gainesville, is measured on a per-capita basis, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan, health policy think tank.

Advocates had rallied against the Senate's proposed reduction — a 25 percent decrease from the 2011-12 budget — as a cut that would eventually cost taxpayers more in jails, police services and hospital emergency room costs. The state is facing a shortfall of $1 billion, and the state's two governing chambers had competing visions of how to cut the state's funding for health care. The fastest-growing item in the budget is Medicaid, the state's insurance for low-income Floridians and the Department of Children and Families' funding that goes to community mental health centers that help those with little or no insurance.

The state funding that the state Senate had wanted to reduce accounted for nearly 10 percent of the annual budget at Meridian Behavioral Healthcare. The Senate's proposed cuts undoubtedly would have resulted in fewer slots and jobs at Meridian, which already has more than 100 adults waiting for drug treatment services and nearly 200 waiting for mental health services, said Maggie Labarta, Meridian's president and chief executive officer.

She got the call about the budget deal at about 10:30 p.m., Sunday.

"I'm certainly breathing a little easier," she said. "There's relief that there are folks in (state) leadership who understand the importance of community mental health."

Dr. Adrian Tyndall, chair of emergency medicine at the University of Florida and chief of emergency services at Shands, said his department often deals with people who could have been served in a less expensive setting.

"It's obviously a problem of a national scale where there are ever decreasing resources for outpatient mental health," he said.